Benjamin Linder, Editor (2022) Invisible Cities and the Urban Imagination

Abstract

Cities have long-fascinated thinkers and storytellers alike. Take for instance Henry James’s moody depiction of a rain-soaked Venice in The Wings of the Dove (1902) where a dismal, wintry Venice reflects the amoral values and ruthless desires of James’s characters. James’s vivid depiction of Venice brings to mind Italo Calvino’s poetic rendering of the city in Invisible Cities (1972). Venice has a prominent, if nebulous, place in Calvino’s chronicle — as Marco Polo says to his interlocutor Kubla Khan: ‘To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me it is Venice’ (78). The influence of Invisible Cities is far-reaching and its fifty-year anniversary has inspired a new volume of work, Invisible Cities and the Urban Imagination (2022) that embraces the interdisciplinary, visionary character of Calvino’s text. There is much to recommend in this volume: each of its twenty-seven chapters (including an introduction) provide lively interpretations of and interventions into Invisible Cities. Invisible Cities and the Urban Imagination’s thirty-two contributors come the disciplines of ethnography, architecture, anthropology, urban design, art history, literature, philosophy, sociology, and theatre studies. These perspectives testify to the far-reaching effects of Invisible Cities as well as to the imagination of these contributors, all of whom offer fresh insights on Calvino’s classic text.